Iditarod - Mush - Mush

 When in Alaska... The school's spring breaks in our district align with when the Iditarod mushers will be coming through/near their village. So for spring break we took a trip to Nome, Alaska to see the end of the race!

Mike in front of the Iditarod finish line.

The finish line!

Our first musher! They come right down Front Street right past cars driving and people standing on the sidelines.

There they go! To the finish line!

As soon as they go through the finish line, people just walk right up and start petting the dogs. The mushers look over their dogs and start interviewing.

Me and Mike with the dogs in the background : )

Mike wants one...

Look how close they are!

I think it was this musher that was giving out high fives as they rode past.

Deep snow.

All of the mushers

Dallas Seavy: 2012 Iditarod Champion

The teachers we went with: Erick, Lisa, Mike, Lani, Zach, and Rachel

The entrance to the dog lot.

Where the dogs stay after the race.

 

Field Trip to the Post Office!

We are pen palling with Michelle's class. After we finished our last letters we practiced addressing the envelopes, putting the stamps on the letters and dropping them off at the post office. As a special treat, the Post Master, Mark, took us on a behind the scenes tour!

Haha. Waiting in line to go behind the scenes. Silly Children!

Heading to the back.

Mark is showing them where the boxes and mail comes in.

This was their favorite part. Seeing the back of all of the P.O. Boxes where their mail gets put and how it is marked with the names.

Mark showing them where he picks the letters out of the box at the end of the day.

I really wanted to take a good picture but I couldn't get them to not make silly faces! Oh well, you can see them at their finest  : ) This also happens to be a day when a lot were sick. You can see seven here, two were lagging behind, and usually we have 12.

Serpentine with the Steneks

A Christ Sign is like a Christmas ornament made of seal skins and decorated with beautiful beads. When we first got her I saw how beautiful they were and loved the name of them and knew I wanted a bunch of them for Christmas presents. We asked around and found out that our neighbor made them and so we place a "small order."

It turns out that the patterns for the Christ Signs were still at our neighbors camp on the mainland and so they were taking one last boat ride to get the patterns and a few other left over things. They were so kind as to invite us on this trip and these are a few of the beautiful pictures we left with!

The boat ride out there. I want to say it took about 45 minutes to get there. The water was really shallow in some places, so shallow that they needed to get out and push! We traveled with our neighbor and his wife and four of their six kids! The boy next to mike is one of my second graders. A bit bright out on the way there!

If you look closely on the skyline you can see the village. We are on the lagoon looking out to the village on the other side of the village would be the sea.

: ) Me and one of their girls, she is also one of our third grade cheerleaders!

This is outside of their camp. She showed me where they pick some berries and we collected a few.

Also standing right out of the camp. If you look closely you can see one of the kiddos showing me around

I spy a little boy running...

Playing outside.

Ahhh the beautiful sunset!

This is the entire camp!

Us bundling up to leave : (

Awwwwww..

Ken, I just wanted to let you know what Mike was teaching your child in the back of the boat on the way home... haha. I also want to point out the cute sleepy head, he slept the whole way home even when the waves were kind of choppy!

1, 2, 3, awwwwww, again.

Some birds.

Looking out the back of the boat. This is on the way home.

 

One final photo.

We had a fabulous time. It was a while ago so I forget some of the details now. All we know for sure was that our neighbors were super kind to invite us and we enjoyed it so! I also remember my feet getting incredibly cold, so cold in face that I pulled out a pair of socks they were taking home and put them on on the way home. This was in September so it brings us warm memories in the bitter cold.